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Local actor adds award-winning play to his repertoire

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Film and Theater actor Andrew Bosworth will be performing at The City Theatre in Matthew Lopez's award winning production of "The Whipping Man." Bosworth plays a wounded Jewish confederate soldier who returns home only to find it destroyed and abandoned except for his two slaves.

Film and theater actor Andrew Bosworth believes he hasn’t done enough to satiate his curiosity as an artist. In his newest stage role, Bosworth performs as Caleb in The City Theatre Company’s production of Matthew Lopez’s play “The Whipping Man.” Bosworth will perform Friday along with co-actors Robert Pellette and Richard Romeo.

“Being on stage with Bosworth is like being on stage with the sun,” said Trevor Bissell, a veteran actor at the theater company. “You want to step into the glow with the hope that you can be as radiant as he is.”

Born in New Hampshire, Bosworth was raised in a family in which no one was really interested in the arts or in music.

“When I was younger, I never really liked myself very much,” Bosworth said. “So I tried staying quiet for a long time, but that wasn’t really a good outlet for my energy, so I took a drama class on a lark just because it was there. Luckily, I had a good teacher and it was a lot of fun, and I kept doing it and one thing led to another.”

Bosworth graduated in December 2008 with a double major in theater and sociology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. While in college, he received his first big opportunity to star in a Broadway production, “Chess,” as part of the North Carolina Theatre.

“One of the main roles was not cast and they just wanted somebody to stand in, and I was like, “I’ll do that,’ so I was standing in and they said, ‘Why don’t we just give it to this kid?,’” Bosworth said. “So I got pumped up from the ensemble to the supporting lead in the show, which I was not, at all, expecting.”

In spring 2010, Bosworth toured all over North Carolina performing a series of Shakespearean plays, including “Hamlet” and “Taming of the Shrew,” as part of the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival educational tour.

“The shows were zany and whacky,” Bosworth said. “These were hour-long adaptations, where we each had up to three roles per show, going back and forth switching characters. I even got to play a girl.”

In 2013, Bosworth starred in the Austin Theatre Project’s “Falsettos,” an operetta, which is how he met Jeff Hinkle, director-in-residence at the theater company.

“He has this terrible intensity,” Hinkle said. “He had such a depth of performance during auditions ,and I just knew that he was going to get better and better during rehearsals. He was the most professional, committed actor I’ve ever worked with.”

Bissell, who has worked with Bosworth only on “Othello” so far, hopes to work with him more in the future.

Bosworth believes improvisation is a key skill and likes to get into the details of his character and the story before every performance.

“He’s incredibly gifted, and, once he gets the part, he’s truly committed to doing the research for the character,” Hinkle said.

Although opportunities have come his way by chance, Bosworth has been eager to learn and to grow.

“My professor of theater in college told us, ‘You have to want it more than you want to eat. You have to want it more than you want to own a home,’ and then he paused and said, ‘You have to want it more than you want to be happy,’ and that really stuck with me,” Bosworth said. “That’s tough and not many people realize that.”